Why does FOX dominate the ratings wars for news media?

Steve Benen in the Political Animal at Washington Monthly posted an article that reported FOX "News" has going away more viewers than any other media outlet that is counted as part of the news media. I just realized why they dominate those ratings. FOX is the only organization being measured as a member of the news media that caters to viewers who demand social certainty in the face of great social changes. It is also the most likely of any media outlet to warn its viewers that everyone else is lying to them. FOX carefully crafts an image to attract frightened people who recognize that we are in a period of great social change and who are afraid they are going to lose what they have because of it. Then they promise that if the public elects the politicians it promotes that image will come true.

This is not a problem for people with great wealth since possession of wealth protects people from all but the most radical social change. They live in gated communities and avoid meeting with anyone not of their class. They protect themselves by promoting increased police, more laws and in these days of globalism, by getting their friends in government to spend more on the military. But even the most wealthy are afraid, that's why the Republicans are catering to them with tax cuts and with repeal of the inheritance tax.

The poor as a group are not up in arms because they can't be in any worse condition even if things do change radically, and American history shows that little will get better for them no matter what changes.

Look at the public which is being counted as viewers. Fox's ratings are based on middle class cable TV viewers who fear the current social changes will cause them to lose what they have. The American public right now is more afraid generally than I have ever seen, and I am in my late 60's. The closest to this that I have ever seen was during the 60's when the race riots and assassinations were happening, but that was not stacked on top of economic disaster - especially the many foreclosures - and a radical right-wing government removing the social safety net as was installed in 2001 (and which Obama has not appeared to change much.) There are a lot of reasons to be afraid of loss, especially for the middle class, and those who have controlled the government in the twenty-first century advertise that the government will not and cannot help if individuals lost their security. That was Ronald Reagan's great message and it has been the message of the American right-wing since the nineteenth century.

To frightened middle class people a government using authoritarian means of control looks very attractive. That's especially true if the media can sell the idea that the social changes that are the threat are all caused by the demands of the lower social classes. So FOX sells the ideas that the economic problems of today were caused by poorly managed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac because the Democrats wanted more poor people to get their own homes. (Completely untrue. See also An autopsy of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.) The drug problem is caused by crazy poor people hopped up on Meth who have uncontrollable demands to pay for their drug habits, so the only solution it to imprison them. (Also completely untrue.) Other similar simplistic lies include blaming crime on immigrants, usually from Mexico. These lies are especially aimed at the darker-skinned Mexicans of Indian descent since that resonates with America's innate suspicion and fear of darker-skinned people. These and other similar lies are spewed by FOX in order to hand control of the American federal government to their politicians in the conservative Republican Party. But since the solutions being proposes are based on lies and half-truths, they won't work. The government that implements those solutions will see them fail and have to fall back on police powers to control the lower classes who will be taxed to make up the money given to the wealthy and the big businesses.

This is what the attack against Social Security is all about. Social Security retirement is well funded for a long time, but the excess money the baby boomers have paid to cover their own retirement were put into government bonds and either wasted on wars or given to the wealthy in tax breaks. Next year the baby boomers start to retire and are going to demand the money loaned in treasury bonds be paid back. The only solution is for the government to start taxing the wealthy to pay back what it borrowed or lower benefits so that it does not have to pay the money back to the (middle class) retirees who thought they were saving for retirement. Since the wealthy have a lot of investment in government bonds they do not want the government to default and they do not want their taxes raised, so Pete Peterson and friends will lower Social Security benefits so that it never has to be paid back.

Another major problem is that the failed government policies being promoted by FOX lies and half-truths will justly cause criticism. Since the policies are not based on facts which can be independently verified, expect to see government censorship and police reactions against leakers. That's the core of the attack on Julian Assange and Wikileaks. The government applies security primarily to protect themselves from criticism. Most of the material is already known to real enemies. But policies based on lies cannot be supported by reason. They have to be maintained by force.

One group especially likely to react with approval towards an authoritarian government is the elderly middle class. These people are FOX' most fervent viewers. They have a lot to lose and as a person gets older he realizes that he no longer has he time and energy to recover lost property and expected future benefits when those things he expected to have are taken from him. When a person is younger the idea of taking risks to improve his life is exciting, especially since the young are usually sure you will win when they take risks. (Same reason I buy a lottery ticket.) As a person gets older he has more to lose and much more awareness just how easy it will be to lose it. This is why older people are more likely to be afraid and demand greater security than younger people are.

What does that have to do with the ratings? FOX provides the clearest image of a society that does away with uncertainty for the middle class (sure it's mostly lies) and they discourage their viewers from watching any other media that presents a less saccharine (but more realistic) image. All the other "news" media provides information about threats and very little reason to feel secure. So those most in need of reassurance gravitate to the only source in the media - FOX. Everyone else scatters their ratings to all of the other media members.

Voila! FOX dominates the ratings with a very high percentage of older, misinformed viewers.

Jon Stewart on how FOX handles "news."

Jon Stewart describes FOX's perpetual revulsion machine. Not only is is funny, it is extremely educational.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
For Fox Sake!
www.thedailyshow.com
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A few interesting items this morning

• Crazy? Or strategy? Time to look at the train wreck. Orly Taitz is nothing but a public disaster in progress. Taiz states that she will refuse to pay the $20,000 fine that federal district court Judge Clay Land imposed on her this morning. Thus sayth the chief Birther. Is it insanity or media manipulation? But I repeat myself.


• Jon Stewart does a really illuminating (and funny) segment on CNN's non-news non-fact-checking. What is CNN actually selling, I wonder? It's damned sure not "news."


• The health care industry fired its big guns yesterday. They published a Price Waterhouse Coopers report that predicted large, immediate increases in the price of health insurance very soon if the health care bills pass. Today PWC took much of the sting out of the report by admitting that no cost savings resulting from the proposed health insurance changes were included in the report Gee. Report on all possible price increases with no possible cost savings. And we should be surprised that the report predicts (wait for it) PRICE INCREASES! (Ta Daa!) The health insurance industry is afraid that if the health care imitative passes they will be less able to gouge sick and potentially sick people for unconscionably high premiums for alleged insurance that as often as not does not actually pay off. It's the best argument yet for single payer health insurance (or failing that, at least a strong public option) that removes the private insurance parasites from the system.


• If Republican Senator Olympia Snowe dares to vote for the health care reform bill the Republican Caucus has threatened to keep her from getting the position of ranking member on the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee. I wonder what the Democrats could offer her to switch parties? Or if her conscience can trump her ambition?

The uselessness of what passes for broadcast news

Jon Taplin wrote Signal To Noise Ratio. It starts:

Even though most of my time is spent writing a book, I've been wondering why I'm blogging less, reading blogs less, watching less cable news and listening to less talk radio and more music. I've come to the conclusion that the whole mediasphere signal-to-noise ratio has been out of whack since the election in November. 2008 was such an historic year for news with a groundbreaking election contest vying for attention with a once in a generation economic collapse. For the managers of media outlets to try to sustain that intensity and interest level past mid November was a fools errand. But that doesn't mean they didn't try.

[...]

Maybe we don't need four hundred channels of TV. Maybe we don't need 346 million blogs. Maybe the careful (and expensive) editing of the New York Times and The New Yorker actually count for something.

I get an interesting insight from Taplin's article.

I am online looking for information, insight and some degree of understanding of the communities I live in, but what I am getting is useless "news." What passes for broadcast "news" today is in fact faux news designed to fill an ever-expanding and inadequately indexed (useless?) news hole. That total news hole is already much larger than anything that will ever be useful to me. The concept of "signal-to-noise" ratio on the broadcast media is the perfect catalyst for understanding. My surprise is that there appears to be such a massive distinction between what passes for "news" and actual useful and informative "information."

My utter disgust at the crap provided by useless "reality" shows that do nothing but offer a cheap product for the business organizations that broadcast uninformative and useless data is high. They are time-wasters intended to deliver ignorant passive and frightened consumers who know nothing except how to buy - buy -buy to advertisers. It saddens me that so many people actually waste their valuable time searching for some form of entertainment in the crap that is broadcast on TV. That's not surprising, though, in a society in which most people are trained to function as ignorant and isolated economic consumers rather than as intelligent actors working in a community of similar people.

The result of the insight is that spending a lot of time attempting to "consume" what is in fact faux news and entertainment is a fool's errand. It is a trap designed for passive and ignorant consumers who provide markets for big businesses. People need community with a lot of organized, useful information, with education and perhaps even insight than they need to simply be consumers of goods and services someone else produces. Broadcast news had the opportunity to provide people with a lot of what they needed, and it abdicated that opportunity because entertainment and faux news presented greater financial profit and political power.

Maybe we really don't need all that broadcasting power. All we really need is some good editors and investigative reporters and scientists working diligently at explaining what is really happening. If so, we damned sure aren't getting it. The existing conceptual "free and unregulated market" as distorted by power-hungry individuals and religious leaders^* certainly isn't providing what we need.

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^* An explanation of my views of how the concepts of an economic free market distorts reality by ignoring the effects of power because the economic effects can be roughly measured mathematically to some extent reliably while power effects cannot will be available upon request if time permits.

Many of the problems of the American society are based on centralization of power

We have all heard Scott McClellan's words - "[T]he national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation…. the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq." (Quoted from the article published by Josh Silver.) The question is, why did so many journalists ALL go along with the Bush administration and fail to question.

Why didn't the serious questions get more TV air time? Why was the only bandwagon out there the one the Bush administration was driving?

The theory is that much of the Press is independent of the administration and can be expected to ask the embarrassing questions of the administration and then publish and explain the responses. Were all the journalists individually complicit in the Bush-directed rush to an unnecessary war?

Now, fives years too late, we get the answers. From Josh Silver's article:

More and more reporters, including major TV correspondents like Jessica Yellin and Chris Matthews have recently admitted that their bosses were pro-war and that it slanted their coverage.

Then from Ruth Rozen, Journalist and historian, we get her experience at what was the most "liberal" newspaper in America:

I worked as an editorial writer at The San Francisco Chronicle, where a liberal editorial board raised serious objections to the war. And yet, in the years following 9/11, I felt editorial restraints that never allowed us to tell the whole truth about the lies and deception that led to America’s most catastrophic foreign policy disaster. [Snip]

So what did I experience? An editor and an editorial board who felt that, in the absence of inside sources, we could not counter the administration’s lies.

Let me give you some examples. I was raised in a Republican family, but schooled by the great iconoclastic journalist I.F. Stone, who taught me that you can find the truth without inside sources, if only you’re willing to see beyond patriotic fervor and examine voices in the public domain that are marginalized, So, I would read national security experts who countered Donald Rumfeld’s ridiculous predictions; I would read the British, Canadian, Italian and French press; I would read the writings of experts in resource wars and weapons of mass destruction.

No, I didn’t know I was right. But I was sure that the administration was lying. And, I knew that at the very least that our editorials should be asking why Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al should be believed when I had found strong evidence that they were cherry picking intelligence, and setting up their own office in the Pentagon, and acting in complete secrecy. [Snip]

When I heard Bush’s inaugural address, I heard two major lies embedded within his speech. But somehow that still wasn’t enough to accuse him of plagiarism and deception.

The truth is, even a liberal newspaper, blessed with a liberal editorial board, did not engage in truth telling. We raised some good questions, wrote about supporting the troops, but failed to describe the deception that led to the catastrophe that was unfolding right before our eyes. [Snip]

This week, I sat with a former colleague from the editorial board in a café, rather than in the room where we used to make our editorial decisions. He admitted that I had been right, but even more, that even in a liberal paper, the editor and most of the board, had felt restrained, afraid of seeming unpatriotic, afraid of saying the emperor wore no clothes, afraid of not giving the President the benefit of the doubt, afraid of truth telling without access to inside sources.

Even without inside sources it was clear early on that the Bush administration was lying and that the Press was either spreading those lies (FOX "News" and the other right-wing liars) or they were shading the news and omitting the opposition.

How did they get away with it?

There are three major TV networks and the cable news organizations, all owned and managed by a very few conservative individuals. The controls in TV regarding what is reported are in the hands of probably fewer than 25 or so individuals. Most local radio stations have been bought up by a very few networks like Clear Channel, and the same controls are applied to what is broadcast. And Newspapers?

The newspapers have lost their revenue streams as the downtown department stored moved to the malls, and the Reagan administration encouraged competing newspapers in the same city to merge or have one buy the other out and shut it down. Control of the news again resides in the hands of two or three people in each city, even if they aren't controlled by the few chains.

News in America is controlled by fewer than 200 individuals. They determine what will get a lot of coverage and what will be ignored.

The result? There is no free market in news in America. The many disasters of the Bush administration starting with Florida 2000 is a direct result of the central control of the news organizations. We have problems that fester because the news controllers do not want to upset the apple cart by telling the public about those problems, and most especially, they don't want to run counter to the wishes of the administration, particularly the Republican administrations.

I would bet that the 200 or so news-controlling individuals are afraid of the vindictiveness of the Republican administrations, which is why they avoid criticizing them while piling on to the Democratic administrations. That's just one of the many biases in the news media.

Another bias is that those 200 individuals are all very wealthy and belong to the class of individuals with great wealth. Chris Matthews gets $5,000,000 a year for what he does. Tim Russert gets even more. And they aren't the top decision-makers. Those top decision-makers can remove Matthews and Russert just as the head of CBS news removed Dan Rather when he became too inquisitive.

Those wealthy news-controllers don't want to upset their own apple carts, so they give labor and the poor short shrift. Better than those groups get propaganda on how to be better Americans (and support the wealthy) rather than that they learn that the social deck as stacked against them (by those wealthy individuals and their wealthy friends.)

Very large organizations do not exist to produce and sell products and services. They exist to make money, and the top CEO's control all their subordinate companies by controlling the money those companies get to keep or receive to invest. Those top CEO's are bankers, generally with little close knowledge of how the products they sell are created or used. All that matters is that revenues increase and costs be reduced.

This also applied to news organizations. Their purpose is not to collect and present their news. Their purpose is to make a profit by selling advertising, and the news department is bait to cause viewers/readers to look at the ads. Increasing revenue means selling more ads or selling ads at higher prices. Reducing costs means cutting newsroom staff - since distribution of the news is pretty much a fixed cost.

As a result, those of us who expected the news organizations to provide the information needed for an informed public who would vote for those who best manage America are sadly disappointed. IN the absence of an active and aggressive news media, we get bad government filled with corruption and ignoring the real problems that government has to deal with in an industrial society.

Welcome to the Reagan Revolution as it works its way into creating a Latin American society with about 10% wealthy 90% poor and no significant middle class. It is the result of too much centralization of power.

What has gone wrong with newspapers

I have read newspapers since the 1950's and still do, but the ones that are published today simply aren't equal to those earlier ones. About a year ago I was looking for some information about my community during the 1940's after WW II and went to the library archives to read some newspapers. Frankly I was shocked.

The same newspapers I pick up today and rarely find a real news item in were interesting and chock full of news in those days. They had real reporters out all around the world writing clear, lengthy stories from the four corners of the world. My city had several newspapers with foreign bureaus and published news, not gossip. Today my city has a single newspaper and the best national and international news is written in Washington D.C. by the McClatchy news bureau. There are no foreign bureaus. Apparently the only newspapers who still have them are the New York Times, the Washington Post and the LA Times. None in Texas. What's gone wrong with newspapers?

Jon Talton, writing as "Rogue Columnist," explains why in a manner that makes a lot of sense to me. The answer is that newspapers grew to be big business. The family run papers sold stock on Wall Street and the families left the business. The corporate managers came in and promised impossibly high rates of return on investment to jack up stock prices. To achieve those returns they cut the editorial staff and closed international bureaus, making themselves less attractive to customers. But how does an accountant measure the value of a good reporter or a foreign bureau to readers? There simply is no metric that accountants can use.

And Wall Street will not put a high value on a business whose total revenue and net profit are not both growing. How do you achieve that? You buy out your competitors and raise advertising rates, and when your competitor tries to buy you out, you sell your own company to a large newspaper cartel that can protect you. But the cartel then sends in the bean counters and cut the "nonproductive" (for that read Editorial staff) positions to save money. So you end up with single newspaper towns in which the single newspaper has no competition to beat when getting the local stories.

Since the Reagan administration began permitting one newspaper to buy out and close down its competitor I have seen the Dallas Morning News buy out and shut down the Dallas Times Herald, and the Houston Chronicle bought out and shut down the Houston Post. In both cases, the surviving local monopoly newspaper immediately raised advertising rates and shortly thereafter began cutting editorial staff and publishing fewer features. Local news coverage ceased to include controversy and was reduced to metropolitan boosterism.

Since I don't follow high school sports, the only remaining reason for reading a newspaper is the comic page, and they keep shrinking that.

Here's Jon's take on the subject:

-The creation of monopoly markets and, through consolidation, cartels of newspaper ownership. Economic history shows us that monopolies and cartels always commit suicide. Divorced from the imperatives of real competition, monopolies easily slip into a self-centered world of bureaucratic conformity and a desire to protect the status quo. They became slow and rigid, in other words, road kill for competitors.

-Consolidation of newspapers into large, publicly held companies. This removed newspapers from their communities and killed a sense of holding a public trust. And it left them at the mercy of Wall Street. Newspaper executives promised returns that are nearly impossible for any (legal) entity to sustain year after year. Everything came to depend on delivering these short-term “growth” numbers to the Street. Among the biggest losers was the ability to invest in future technologies and the ability to shift to meet changing consumer habits. Those wouldn’t deliver instant double-digit margins. Thus, newspaper companies failed to start, or failing that, buy, a Yahoo or Craig’s List.

-A largely defensive strategy took hold, even though history shows that no company under siege ever merely cut its way to recovery. Significantly, investment in the unique intellectual capital of newspapers – journalism – was constantly reduced. Newsrooms lost much of their top talent. Marketing, more important than ever in business, was never a newspaper strength, and was cut to the bone. Research and development received little more than lip service, or was another tool to hand down demands for shorter, dumber, fluffier stories. There was little interest on the advertising side in the kind of “skunk works” that might have leapfrogged from print to online before the crisis became acute. No longer did the smartest business-school grads want to work on the business side of newspapers. A thousand cuts hurt readership. One example: eliminating stock tables antagonized the most loyal readers, older folks who weren’t online. Many went away. Multiply that around every newspaper each time a key reader destination was eliminated. The cutback of international coverage comes just as America's future is more and more determined by world events (yes, even the soccer mom's ability to fill up her SUV).

-Groupthink was a natural outgrowth of monopolies and the demands of Wall Street. This was hastened by the ascendancy of Gannett and its (for a while) superior returns. A startlingly conformist agenda emerged all over: design over content; short, uninteresting (but non-irritating to advertisers) stories, etc. The universe of different tactics, strategies and innovations that a competitive industry would have evolved never happened. The industry became strikingly inwardly focused, insulated from a changing world. When change was noted, it somehow always produced moves that degraded the news product. Years were spent developing “new editorial products” to attract non-readers. This was a questionable use of resources, as surveys and focus groups showed most of these people wouldn’t read anyway, and certainly not subscribe seven days a week to a print edition. But the resources to do them were diverted away from coverage that served existing readers. Industry leaders were singularly cavalier about their loyal customers, while chasing ones they had little chance to attracting.

-Leadership collapsed under the weight of these forces. A generation of managers that would go along with these dictates rose, while those with other ideas were pushed out or aside. These surviving managers – of course with honorable exceptions – were singularly incapable of dealing with the historic turning points facing newspapers. Every day they came in hoping to not make a mistake, to merely preserve the business they had, or to push through artificial, top-down, one-side-fits-all formulas, usually backed by questionable research. At some chains, the jobs of editors became little more than gathering stuff for graphic do-dads and implementing the content rules cooked up at headquarters. These were once the front-line leaders who made the biggest difference in the quality of a product based, inexorably, on the written word, well told. The simple creed of "get a great story and put it in the newspaper (or online)" went away. For example, experienced police reporters went away -- even though it's clear that well-done cop stories draw readers. In their place was a 21-year-old taking dictation from a police public-affairs announcement.

-The biggest problem, of course, had nothing to do with the newsrooms. It was the collapse of an unsustainable business model. Simply put, the model involved sending miniskirted saleswomen out to sell ads at confiscatory rates to lecherous old car dealers and appliance-store owners. Protecting these profits, whether from national, local or classified ads, became the central focus of newspaper bosses. These areas were the most vulnerable to new competitors. But the condition of the industry by the 1990s – risk averse, promising unrealistic margins, losing its best talent, ignoring ideas outside its preconceived notions – left it unable to meet these threats.

I won't discount the competition of TV in providing headlines and tabloid gossip passing as news while sucking up the local advertising dollars. But TV doesn't now, and generally never has provided timely news except in the case of mass disasters. It is too stuck in the studio and too hung up on the model-type image of the newsreader to bother finding the underlying social currents that make up real news.

I don't expect that newspapers will ever return. They have had a major problem with adapting their business model to the late twentieth century American economy and society. What is clear, however, is that the "solutions" of recapitalization, consolidation and cartelization that Wall Street pushed onto the newspaper industry have both increased the speed at which the newspaper industry has died and prevented the rise of innovative leaders who might have built something out of what has been a long and excellent tradition of news gathering and publication.

NPR's Morning Edition blew it this morning.

I woke up this morning listening to Morning Edition on National Public Radio. Usually its informative and current. But this morning the best that can be said it that it was current.

There was a segment on the non-news called O.J. Simpson. That's celebrity gossip, no better than the latest on Brittany Spears, Nicole Richey or Donald Trump. If I want that garbage I'll choose to waste my time and read the National Tattler in the supermarket checkout line. I do not expect that from NPR's Morning Edition.

An O.J. segment is a wast of my time, a horrible waste of NPR's scarce (but linear) air time, and it was rotten news judgment to present it.

That's just one more case of the general dumbing down of the news media. It's a damned shame that the disease of the American media has spread to National Public Radio.

News from a slow Monday

There are several interesting news stories up today:

• FBI, IRS searching Stevens' Girdwood house
  Anchorage Daily News on FBI and IRS raid on home of Sen. Ted Stevens.


• FBI raid
  TPM report and video on the raid on Alaska Sen. Steven's home.


• Edwards: "They want to shut me up"
  From the Politico. Edwards recognizes the threat he is to conservatives and shows how they are trying to marginalize him.


• GOP: Want a Reagan? Look to Goldwater
  Michael O'Brien at Politico suggest that instead of modeling on Reagan, the Republican candidates for the Presidential nomination might do better by modeling on Goldwater.


• Mikey strikes again
  Jonathon Martin at Politico points to the anemic fundraising reported by Fred Thompson and suggests that he is not long for this campaign.


• Novak
  Laura Rozen links to the traitor Bob Novak who describes a risky Bush covert action trying to suppress Kurdish Guerrillas in order to keep Turkey from invading Iraq. Laura describes it as a PR leak to Novak designed to assuage Turkish feelings of being ignored.


• Cheney Big Brother?
  Laura Rozen published in Mother Jones - was it Cheney rather than Bush who sent Gonzales to strong arm AG Ashcroft into approving from his hospital bed the domestic spying program that then acting attorney general James Comey had refused to reauthorize?


• The Cambodia Card
  Rick Perlstein debunks the right-wing myth of the Cambodia "Killing Fields" as an example of Leftist politics.


• Chief Justice Roberts Suffers Seizure
  This is Robert's second seizure. The first was in 1993. A person who has two seizures meets the definition of epilepsy.


• Destroying The GOP's Congressional Approval-Rating Spin
  Republicans really, really want to ignore Bush's truly rotten approval ratings. This is another of their "Don't look at the little man behind the curtin" crap. Bob Geiger does a good job of debunking the conservative crap.


• Impeach Gonzales?
  Jay Inslee (D-WA) to drop the resolution asking the Judiciary Committee to begin impeachment proceedings against Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.


• When an Interview Is Definitely a Blow-Job
  EmptyWheel expresses her disgust at the apparent avoidance of real contact with the Press when faking an interview to describe his performance as Federal Reserve Chairman.


• The Rubber-Stampers’ Latest Contortion
  The Congressional Republican fake resolution introduced so that they can look like they are voting to get out if Iraq without in anyway forcing Bush to get out of Iraq. The original article is quoted and then debunked. Bush won't move to leave IRaq, and the Republicans won't vote to force him to leave. How do they run for reelection? Vote for fake withdrawal proposals.